Snow As Parody

Comparative Critical Studies 4, 3, pp.
403432
DOI: 10.3366/E1744185408000098
BCLA 2007
Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody:

Difference as Sameness
SIBEL
EROL
THE EVOLUTION OF THE EASTWEST TROPE IN PAMUKS NOVELS
In presenting the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Turkish writer
Orhan Pamuk, the Swedish Academy commended him for his discovery
of new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.1 The deliberate
choice of clash is a coded, evocative way of simultaneously bringing up
the now well-worn phrase the clash of civilizations and disavowing it
by replacing civilizations with cultures. This is also carefully balanced
with the more positive word interlacings. However, the impression
remains that concerns of political correctness on the Academys part have
affected their language formulation more than their actual thinking. After
all, does not the reformulation of this clich convey cum grano salis the
same message as the original that was alluded to, indicating that Pamuks
main problematic is the clash of civilizations ?
Either version of this formulation is reductive, reflecting the kind of
complacent reading that I hope to contextualize and complicate in this
essay. What appears as a clash in Pamuks works is his working out
of his central trope of East and West. Throughout his novels he does
indeed play with the terms East and West because of their primacy as
organizing and relational concepts and the multiplicity of their mimetic
references. However, as I will show in my discussion of Snow, this is
rather subordinated to an entirely different interrogation of the creation
of meaning and construction of identity. Pamuk uses East and West as
provisional terms for understanding and representing his real topic of
investigation, which is the relationship between similarity and difference.
This abstract philosophical exploration of the connection between
similarity and difference, which resembles what Derrida defines as
diffrance, is the end point of the evolution that the East and West
trope goes through in Pamuks uvre. In his early novels, the East and
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the West are political terms that denote clear-cut and easily identifiable
ideological positions within Turkey. Their meaning is expanded into an
international arena in his middle novels in order to portray a contrast
between two world views. The force of the trope lies in its oppositional
duality at this stage. In Snow, as in his other work from the same period,
Pamuk offers a wider view on this duality by placing it in a relationship of
a series that has at least three terms, demonstrating that the oppositional
difference depicted in the contrastive formulation of East versus West is
only one feature of a larger system of relationships generated and held
together by the principle of similarity.2 One important series established
in this novel is the relationships between the three stages of the
East/West trope outlined above. Pamuk depicts each stage separately,
but also links them in a series. He puts them in a relationship of
encapsulation,3 where the largest term, the philosophical investigation
of difference, subsumes, but also keeps intact as its building blocks, the
other two stages out of which it grows.
The original source of the East and West terminology is a specifically
internal discourse of modernization within Turkey. Consequently, these
terms evoke considerable historical and political resonance for Turks and
how they define their lives and identities. They constitute immediate
demarcators of life choices and political position even though their
perceived content and meaning have shifted over time in a relational ebb
and flow. However, their centrality to Turkish political and historical
discourse, both in terms of Turkeys internal understanding of itself and
of its external relationship with other nations, has remained constant.
Turkish official history narrates the smooth emergence of a Western
nation out of an Eastern empire through a process of negotiation and
synthesis.
Pamuks work, on the other hand, points to ruptures and losses
that have created a split-consciousness and led to either fragmented
or one-dimensional lives. Dwarfs, limping people and characters with
missing limbs abound in his fiction. Their bodies are the visual and
physical embodiments of historical erasures, the cost of the repression
obfuscated by the purportedly successful story of Westernization. The
ruptures are also experienced as unconscious mourning, which Pamuk
has named hzn in his memoir Istanbul

(2003). Although this term has
only recently been defined as a state of loss in the memoir, his characters
have manifested it from the outset.
Pamuks as yet untranslated first novel Cevdet Bey ve Ogullar (Cevdet
Bey and His Sons, 1982) deals directly with the history of Westernization
Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody
405
in its various phases, from the Tanzimat (Reform) of 1839 to the political
turmoil of the 1970s, as reflected in the lives of the three generations of a
family whose name, Isk which means anything from a light seller
to a light giver sums up their Enlightenment vision while giving a
metaphorical slant to the meaning of the familys light bulb factory. This
novel covers the same ground traversed by the nationalist Turkish novel
of the 1930s, but is delivered from the vantage point of the late 1970s and
with the novelistic idiom of that later era.
His next novel, Sessiz Ev (The Silent House, 1983), which also
remains untranslated, covers the same historical terrain, but looks back at
it from the perspective of the late 1970s. The eponymous house belonged
to the grandfather, a deceased physician, and is now occupied by his
ailing wife, the grandmother, and his illegitimate son, a dwarf born out
of an affair he had with the housekeeper. This son is the sole caretaker
of the grandmother and the house that is falling apart. The narrative
revolves around the summer vacation of the three grandchildren in this
house, through which Pamuk presents a highly political story that deals
with class difference as well as the politics of representation. The novel,
made up of a series of first-person narratives, shows that truths are
multiple because each person views and comprehends the same events
from a different perspective. The house of the title, however, may
crucially be understood as referring to the legacy both of the positivist
spirit of the nineteenth-century Turkish Enlightenment and of the more
traditional Islamic belief and practice embodied by the grandfather and
grandmother, respectively. While the grandfather, who here takes on a
metaphorical last name, Darvinoglu, son of Darwin, undertakes to write a
multi-volume encyclopedia in the vein of the eighteenth-century French
Encyclopdistes, the grandmother burns the encyclopedia, fearing it was
the work of Satan. This easily visible, broad-brush opposition between a
secular Western stance and a conservatively religious Eastern view forces
the novel to be read, at least on the surface, as a political allegory of
Turkish modernization because of the centrality of this opposition in
defining modernization within Turkey.
Pamuks first two novels, even as they experiment with narrative
techniques, are mimetic works in the realist tradition. They deal with the
foundational problematic of modern Turkish identity within the internal
idiom of Eastern and Western positions that chart the official historical
narrative of the nation. Although these novels claim that fiction has a
better chance of capturing and representing the past than history, thus
revealing an understanding of history as a kind of fiction, both were
S I BEL EROL
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4
loved by traditional critics. With their specifically Turkish thematic

constellation and corresponding vocabulary, these novels have a familiar
feel, written as they are with realist techniques that foster identification.
Readers instinctively sympathize with the characters and care for them.
Pamuk carried the East-West problematic into an international realm
when he contrasted Ottoman and European identities in The White Castle
(1985) and My Name Is Red (1998). Both focus on the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth century, but whereas the former concentrates on
science, the latter is about art. Despite dealing with highly traditional
and stereotypical definitions of East and West, both use postmodernist
techniques. Indeed, The White Castle represents a turning point in
Pamuks literary career. In this book, he cast a quintessentially Turkish
brand of inquiry into identity formation as a postmodernist quandary of
how one becomes oneself at a time when this novels global readership
was still divided into first, second and third worlds. The answer was
equally postmodernist and liberating: one is whoever one chooses to be.
Yet, in order to demonstrate the very concept of choice, the book reduces
the content of the choices to the extremely narrow and stereotypical.
In The White Castle, to be Western means to be hard-working,
ambitious, driven, and individualist; conversely, to be Eastern means to
be pleasure-loving, indolent, and sensuous. As the Sultan keeps repeating
throughout the novel, people are exactly the same everywhere in the
world. This is made literal by the fact that the Venetian and the Ottoman
Hoja, who are the central protagonists, look identical. The novel also
indicates that the ideal is the wholeness embodied in the co-existence
of the Hoja and the Venetian. This is encapsulated by the object of
the title, the white castle Doppio, which symbolically expresses the
doubleness in its literal meaning. But the white castle is only ever a
vision that is glimpsed for one moment like Kafkas castle; it can never
be reached. However, its existence enables the exchange of places. Hoja
and the Venetian pass beyond this castle on the mountain, taking on the
identity that better suits and defines them. Because he is an ambitious
scientist, Hoja becomes a Westerner, and because he enjoys socializing
and pleasure more than work, the Venetian ends up as an Easterner. The
novel shows how, while Hoja and the Venetian share the name Abdullah
and are parts of the same whole, they can each be Abdullah only one at
a time in sequential order.5 Their freedom to choose is made available
at the cost of the superficiality and limitedness of definitions, which are
depicted as free-floating terms unconnected with any specific origin. This
is highlighted by the fact that the Venetian can duplicate his Edenic
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childhood garden in Gebze without needing to go back to Venice. One

can be Eastern or Western in any geographical location, just like one can
be an introvert or an extrovert, although it is impossible to be both at the
same time.
The stark opposition of these terms reappears in My Name Is Red,
where the idea of the West is represented by Renaissance painting
and its central concept of perspective, which dictates that objects
be painted verisimilarly in their proper spatial relationship with
one another. Size was thus determined by perspective. The Eastern
counterpart of Renaissance painting, by contrast, is presented through
the masters of Persian painting and their followers at the Ottoman court.
Although they too use the line of horizon, they depict objects in their
figurative relationship to one another in terms of value rather than
verisimilitude. Nothing in the picture can be bigger than the Sultan, who
by definition is the most important figure in the painting. Also, while
Renaissance paintings are lifelike and realistic, Eastern painting is ruled
by convention; this is why Shekure, the heroine of the novel, laments the
fact that if her picture were to be painted, it would have to be in Chinese
face as demanded by tradition. But while the novel locates such characters
as Elegant, Enishte, Master Osman and Olive across the spectrum of a
dichotomized East-West paradigm as people either with more Eastern or
with more Western sensibilities, it also intimates that the encroachment
on the Eastern by the Western is inevitable.
The theme of the East and West as a set of ruling oppositions
in Pamuks novels thus exhibits a specific trajectory: it shows the
development of Turkish discourses on identity from a specifically
Turkish manner of speaking to a language that resonates internationally
because it provides an easy vocabulary to delineate difference. These
novels make it possible for one to speak of East and West as constructs,
without addressing problems of inequality, whether of circumstances or
power, while maintaining the brotherhood and equality of humanity as a
whole. In Pamuks fictional world, East and West are not static categories
of thought. Rather, they are provisional concepts that are constituted
differently throughout his works, each of which explores the idea of
difference in terms of a specific historical context. East and West are
signifiers that develop their meaning through their relationship to each
other as opposites contained by the larger similarity and commonality of
humanity.
Another manifestation of Pamuks preoccupation with opposites that
are effectively each others double is his prevalent usage of intertextuality,
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through which he constantly pairs his narrative with other narratives that
can be called its doubles. All of Pamuks works engage intertextually
with at least one text from either the Eastern or Western tradition,
represented by a variety of genres ranging from novels, poems and plays
to paintings, photographs, films and songs. The Black Book (1990), for
example, uses Sheyh Galips mystical allegory Beauty and Love (1783)
as an organizing principle for its central search. The love story between
Black and Shekure in My Name is Red, to cite another example, is
modelled on Nizamis rendition of the Shirin and Husrev story from the
twelfth century even though Firdowsis name is also brought up as an
homage to his earlier telling of the same love story in the tenth century
in his Shahnameh.6 Pamuk, by mentioning these two previous masters,
provides the genealogy of his own narrative. He encapsulates these two
canonical renditions in his own narrative, which he offers as the next
development in the evolution of a shared master story. This linking of
texts in a series that can be read dynamically forward or backward injects
an open-ended, evolutionary telos into their interpretative possibilities.
Pamuk anchors his own text within a tradition and a past while opening
up those master texts for contemporary and future meanings. Although
the source texts alluded to provide an interpretive frame for their updated
counterparts, they also serve as the models against which difference can
be articulated, engendering ironic rereadings.
The pinnacle of this intertextual enterprise is The New Life (1994),
which pronounces everything to be a text. There is no way of escaping
this framework, which, as G. A. Phillips reminds us, is a theoretical
position associated with deconstruction and in particular Derridas
central thesis that a text [. . . ] is henceforth no longer a finished
corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins,
but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to
something other than itself, to other differential traces.7 But Derridas
infinite deferral is not only the novels organizing principle; Pamuks
novel epitomizes the contraption shown at the gadgets fair episode,
made with mirrors that infinitesimally reflect everything in an endlessly
regressive manner. Unsurprisingly, the protagonist keeps reading and
rereading a book (which also happens to be the book we are reading)
whose meaning can only be understood in terms of other works. In its
madcap multiplication of texts that ricochet off each other, Pamuks book
shows that difference is created out of similarity. There are thirteen
Mehmets, each of whom is a different person, even though they all
share the predicament of being the original readers of the book who were
409
mesmerized by it. Reminiscent of Borges, one of the Mehmets, who was

originally Nahit but then became Osman, argues that when he copies the
same text over and over, even though the text may remain the same, he
still produces an original book. Each repetition yields difference by virtue
of the very act of repetition itself.
This abstract formulation of the relationship between similarity and
difference is an extension of the East-West opposition. Concerns about
Eastern and Western influence and the Turkish modernization period
are very much present in the novel, but these are no longer the central
terms of reference through which the problematic relationship between
similarity and difference is articulated. The ontological question is
rendered epistemological and textual, and is relegated to the background
as only one manifestation of the question of difference. This marks
the third and last stage of the East-West opposition, as conceived by
Pamuk, in the progression of his work, which started as a specifically local
Turkish issue, then was cast as a global phenomenon, only to be finally
turned into an abstract and theoretical inquiry into the very mechanism
of the conceptualization and representation of difference.
THE PLACE OF SNOW IN PAMUKS UVRE
In turning to Snow, Pamuks most intertextual novel to date, one will

quickly discern that it combines three of these levels of East-West
correlation. Like his previous novels, Snow also exhibits direct allusions
to Pamuks earlier works, for example to The New Life, which appears
in this novel as the name of a pastry shop. In Snow, Kas encounter
with Ipek
and others, as well as the murder of the head of the religious
institute, all take place there. The limping dog wanders in from My
Name Is Red and appears not only in Kars, but also in Frankfurt, two
key locations in Snow. Pamuk even gives away the title of his next book,
The Museum of Innocence, when Snows narrator Orhan talks of the book
he is currently writing. Clearly, Pamuk is deliberately flaunting the fact
that each work is an extension of the previous ones. Growing out of each
other, they are to be read as different manifestations of the problems he
is most centrally interested in. A fuller understanding of any individual
work requires the study of its particular place within the cosmos of
Pamuks complete uvre.
Snow is dense with citation from Pamuks previous works as well as
allusions to the works of other authors; it builds upon them by serving
as their summation. Events in Kars allow for the further investigation
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of the East-West question within the Turkish context by touching upon

the topical issues of Kemalism (Turkeys founding ideology based on a
strict separation of religion and state), secularism, fundamentalism and
militarism. Elections, coups and suicides of headscarf girls are other local
concerns that make it a particularly Turkish book. In this regard, Snow,
which deals quite expressly with the history of military coups in Turkey,
is as specifically a Turkish book as Cevdet Bey and His Sons or The Silent
House.
Pamuks Turkey in Snow, symbolized by Kars, is a tapestry of the
countrys rich and complex history. Located in the east of Turkey,
Pamuks Kars is one manifestation of Easternness and all the attendant
values associated with this term as compared with Istanbul; Kars is also
an amalgamation of Russian, Armenian, Ottoman and Turkish pasts. The
East-West question is interrogated against this historical and cultural
background but is simultaneously given an international dimension, as is
the case with The White Castle and My Name Is Red, when the view shifts
to Germany on the one hand, and when, on the other, the various political
factions of Kars, in preparing their manifesto, try to envision their
other, their invisible interlocutor first as Europe, then as the West and,
finally, as Humanity. Here, Snows intertextuality with both Eastern and
Western material locates its discourse within a broader preoccupation
with difference and similarity not limited to Turkish identity politics.
Even where Pamuk derives questions, methods and techniques of
inquiry from his other novels, in Snow he combines them in a new
dual structure. The work is constructed around a foreground and a
background whose mode of functioning can best be captured by one
of the central metaphors of the book: the theatre. Drawing on Hegels
highlighting of the similarity between the theatre and history,8 a key
character in Snow, Sunay Zaim, the famous actor, turns theatre into
history by making a theatrical coup real. I will borrow this image from
the book to propose that the characters of Snow are like actors on
a stage. The reader watches them as the plotline of the foreground
proceeds, and this plotline is constituted of everything that the characters
say and do. This foregrounded stage, however, is embedded within a
background of hyperintertextuality that envelops and contextualizes the
narrated events. The background is the totality of what the reader or the
audience sees above or beyond the view of the characters. The characters
know only what they believe in and what happens to them, but the
audience or the reader sees this together with the commentary provided
by the intertextual material. This layer of intertextuality creates dramatic
411
distance from the characters and becomes the basis of the dramatic irony
that guides the readers interpretation of the novel.9
Dramatic irony and thus the relationship of the readers to the
characters are modulated by the limited way in which the latter view
their world. This view is conveyed in the way the characters in Kars
are defined in terms of a schematic dichotomy. For example, being a
Westerner automatically means being an atheist. Being religious, on the
other hand, is immediately understood as a marker of fundamentalism.
Interestingly, these one-dimensional and mutually exclusive definitions
are not imposed from the outside, but are articulated by the characters
themselves. Hande, who faces expulsion from school if she does not take
her headscarf off, is afraid that she may become somebody else. Then
she reassures herself: Even if I did take off my headscarf, I dont think
Id become the kind of woman who flirts with men, or who cant think
of anything but sex.10 This disclaimer, once made, prepares the ground
for its reversal. Hande confesses that without her headscarf she would
become either an evil stranger [. . . ] or a woman who cant stop thinking
about sex (125).
A similar kind of reductive associative logic is at work when Necip,
one of the young Islamist students who ends up having a special spiritual
bond with the main character, Ka, tells the parable of the school principal
who loses his faith as a result of an encounter with a mysterious stranger
in an elevator. The principal immediately turns atheist, and consequently
loses all of his former principles and character. His fallen state is
described as follows: Infected by the disease of atheism he began to put
unreasonable pressure on his lovely little pupils: he tried to spend time
alone with their mothers; he stole money from another teacher whom he
envied (83).
Lack of religiosity is immediately read in the same way by everybody
without any ambiguity. As we see here, other interpretations do not seem
possible. Similarly, Ka accepts his description as an atheist and earnestly
tries to answer questions from Necip and Fazl, the two young Islamists
in the book, as to whether or not, as a representative of this general
Westernized and therefore atheist type, he thinks about suicide all the
time. He could easily have dismissed the boys assumptions both about
himself and atheism. Later, the use of this term in the local paper will
lead to his murder, uncovering the danger of such clear-cut definitions.
One of the most flagrant instances of this kind of one-dimensional
thinking is provided by the terrorist Blues definition of the West and,
consequently, of the East as everything that is its opposite. When Ka
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suggests that Westerners do not like being regarded as a homogeneous

group, Blue asserts, There is, after all, only one West and only one
Western point of view. And we [that is, Easterners] take the opposite
point of view (233).
We see the same irreconcilability of differences in the local political
arena at the scene of the meeting where the various political factions come
together to produce a manifesto. Rather than speaking to one another in a
way that might lead to a synthesis, they each deliver a monologue. They
define themselves oppositionally, thinking they embody an intrinsic
difference that cannot be eliminated or overcome. They are so involved
in their separate causes that they can see neither their similarity nor
their commonality. The irony is that we, as readers, are informed
via the background that other characters who exhibited the same
kind of passionate devotion to their causes have easily switched sides,
with Marxists becoming fundamentalist like Muhtar or militant like
Z. Demirkol or even fascist, as some of Kas and Muhtars former friends
have done in Germany. The reader is able to see that these ideological
camps, as different as their belief systems may be on the surface, make
use of a similar kind of thinking, and hence are fundamentally related.
Although the characters define East and West as mutually exclusive
and irreconcilable terms that cannot co-exist, Pamuk belies precisely
this in the intertextual background that draws equally on Eastern
and Western sources. The striking contrast between the foreground,
where univocal characters act out a one-dimensional plot, and the
multidimensional, polyvalent background brings pressure to bear on the
developments of the plot, undercutting, destabilizing and overturning its
givens. The discrepancy between the overwhelming interconnectedness
between the East and the West in the intertextual fabric of the narrative,
and the anxious separation of them in the plot which politicizes that very
separation, not only allows, but requires the reader to interpret the novel
as a parody.
PARODY IN SNOW AND SNOW AS PARODY
Contemporary theoretical discussion of parody is dominated by Linda

Hutcheon,11 who observed in A Poetics of Postmodernism: Parody often
called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or simply intertextuality
is usually considered central to postmodernism.12 Hutcheon posits that
postmodernist intertextuality rehistoricizes texts13 by dismantling and
exposing implicit assumptions of a natural continuity.14 In its deliberate
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echoing and recontextualization of a past work in a new historical,

social and aesthetic context, parody also foregrounds the politics of
representation and highlights the interconnection between a text and its
particular social and historical context. According to Hutcheon, parody
involves a double process of installing and ironizing, simultaneously
legitimizing and distancing critically without resolving this paradoxical
duality at its core.15 She insists that parody cannot be defined through
periodization, but rather that it manifests a variety of styles in different
eras and contexts, reaching from the witty ridicule to the playfully ludic
to the seriously respectful.16 In analyzing the role of parody in Pamuks
Snow, I will be following Hutcheons inclusive definition.
The most notable aspect of Snow is the discrepancy Pamuk
creates between the claims of the characters, who define themselves
in one-dimensional extremes and through their differences, and the
multi-dimensionality of interlinkings and similarities created through
intertextuality, to which the characters in the novel themselves are not
privy. This contradiction between the foreground and the background
intensifies the monovalence of the characters; indeed, the richness of
possible meanings renders their self-righteous lack of awareness rather
ironic, if not ridiculous. Their world view reframed and deflated by
the dialogic contrast established within and through this intertextual
discourse, the characters are made to appear like stick-figures enclosed
in a snow globe.17 The parody in Snow resides in this sad humour
and, more importantly, in its central irony that is sharpened by the
interchangeability of Eastern and Western texts, which has a deflating
effect in the portrayal of the characters and their limited world view,
even as this intertextuality expands the scope of the novels own
polyphony. The trajectory of irony in the novel is not unidirectional;
the texts referred to, in the process, also acquire new nuances, new
accentuations. The novel is a parody not least due to this latter kind of
dialogism.
The first and main event of the novel is the coup staged by the
actor Sunay Zaim. Inspired by Hegels observation that history and
theatre are similar because they are both based on performance, and
that a good actor and a successful historical leader are those who bring
out the potential alternative meaning in their sphere, he performs a
theatre coup which becomes real. Sunay has always wanted to play
the nationalist leader Atatrk. He looks like Atatrk and when he is on
stage he completely becomes Atatrk, speaking like him and radiating a
soft saintly light: People who watched him spoke of the light shining in
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Sunays eyes, radiating in every direction (400). Having once won the
part of Atatrk in a film, he went on to act like him in public. When he
claimed he could also take on the role of the prophet Mohammed, he lost
both parts and was banished from the business. Believing in Atatrks
ideals and wanting to serve his nation, Sunay subsequently forms an
itinerant theatre group, which performed in little towns of Anatolia and
took up the mission of educating the masses. This didactic mission is
the original and main reason for the founding of Turkish theatre, and
Sunay identifies completely with this intellectual burden, performing his
Brechtian, Bakhtinian (141) plays, albeit always adapting to public taste
defined by low comedy.
In his taking on these intellectual responsibilities and historical
figures, Sunay exhibits what Wolfgang G. Mller calls interfigural
intertextuality.18 As an actor his job is to create this intertextuality, but
he actually wants to be the person he plays, eliminating intertextual
reference and seizing identity instead. He finally achieves this when he
stages the coup. Although he contributes the vision and the appropriate
role-play for the coup, the real authority stems from his friend from the
military high school he attended, Nuri olak, who, despite being of a
very low rank, happens to be the highest ranking authority left in Kars
when the city is closed-off by heavy snow for three days. Nuri olak
goes along with his friend because he thinks the government will be
happy. The coup succeeds in containing the victory of the religious party
candidate who was sure to win the election that was to take place a couple
of days later.
Sunays theatrical coup represents nothing less than a parody of
Turkish history, which is marked by a series of similar coups. The
fictional coup becomes real not only because Sunay demonstrates military
power, but also because people are complicit with it they want the
coup as a means of security. Pamuk here amply exposes the hypocrisy
of the Turkish public, who on the one hand criticize any military coup
as a loss of democracy while on the other hand want the status quo
guaranteed. Their dilemma is similar to that of Ipeks

father, the former
Marxist Turgut Bey, who has to decide whether he will choose the topdown perspective of the Enlightenment or what is perceived to be its
opposite, a bottom-up democracy, when trying to make up his mind
about signing the manifesto. He makes a typical Turkish choice when,
siding with wholesale change dictated from the top, he weighs in on the
side of the Enlightenment, accepting as well what would be considered
its authoritarian civilizational mission.
415
Another important intertext for the coup is the play Buzlar

zlmeden (Before The Ice Melts) by Cevat Fehmi Baskut, which was
published in 1965 following the military coup in 1960. The basic plotline
of a takeover of a town government by outsiders a takeover that remains
unnoticed because of the lack of access to the town for three days as a
result of heavy snowfall is lifted from this play, which depicts patients
who escaped from a psychiatric hospital solving all the problems of a
small town within the three days of their rule. They collect taxes from
the rich to bring electricity to the town and to build roads, and they make
the rich donate the land they appropriated to the poor, for which the
poor of the town regard them as miraculous heroes. The title comes from
the phrase before the ice melts which the patient who impersonates the
governor keeps repeating because he knows full well that he has only until
the snow melts and the roads open up to finish all his reforms. The novel
alludes to this play by name. Sunay Zaim is associated with it because he
was kicked out of military school partly for staging a secret performance
of a play called Before the Ice Melts (193).
What makes the staging of the play such a crime is not merely
disobedience to school authorities in playing hooky, but also the fact
that this play was and is still considered a socialist work that critiques
governmental ineptitude. It seems to be arguing for a revolutionary zeal
that only the crazily foolhardy will exhibit. We see its manifestation in
Sunay Zaim who is also pronounced crazy because of his association with
the plays characters. Yet another example of this behaviour is seen in
the figure of the murderer who takes it upon himself to kill the head of
the religious institute in order to implement his principles. The source
play then is used to crystallize the schema of the novel and allows it
to be recognized in the book. These associations between the play and
the novels delusional characters, however, also render the initial, earnest
reading of the play ironic because, even though these characters are
pronounced real crazy in the play, they are at the same time admired
for their integrity and sense of mission. This is still indeed the canonical
reading of the play in Turkey. When the characteristics of these crazy
heroes appear exhibited by self-righteous zealots in the novel, their
nave idealism becomes ironic, and the source play is turned into a parody
that elicits laughter. By connecting this play with his novel, Pamuk also
opens up new possibilities for rereading the play.
Snow engages intertextually with another landmark play by the Young
Ottoman Namk Kemal, Vatan yahut Silistre (My Fatherland or Silistre,
1873). The play during the staging of which the military coup in the novel
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S I BEL EROL
takes place is entitled My Fatherland or My Headscarf as an homage

to this earlier play. Namk Kemal, one of the first authors to write a
play in Western form, believed that literature had a didactic purpose.
He famously declared that a night spent at the theatre was better than
sleeping at home because of the moral and intellectual edification theatre
afforded its audience. His play was significant for introducing the concept
of vatan (fatherland) and the idea that fatherland was worth dying
for. It privileges service to the fatherland over the pursuit of individual
happiness, represented by the romantic relationship between the young
protagonists Zekiye and Islam

Bey. In fact, Zekiye dresses up as a
man in order to gain the equal opportunity to die for her fatherland.
The fulfillment of the romantic plot is subordinated to the success of
their shared cause, to which they contribute equally. It is through their
patriotic endeavour that they create a future for their love. The two get
married only after risking their lives and saving the castle of Silistre.
The effect of the plays initial performances at the end of the
nineteenth century was so electrifying that the audience chanted Namk
Kemals name after each performance.19 The play struck a chord with
the publics sentiments at a time when they were demanding reforms
from Sultan Abdlaziz. Namk Kemal seemed to have achieved his goal
in eliciting political action through his play. His glory was, however,
short-lived. The Sultan promptly sent him into exile and he eventually
died in Cyprus in 1888. Sunays play in Pamuks novel borrows from
Kemals work not only the mandate to serve the fatherland and to turn
thought into action, but also the focus on a female protagonists clothes
as the basis for defining her identity. While Kemals Zekiye hides her
femininity behind mens clothing, the protagonist of Sunays play, in an
ironic reversal, is made to take her headscarf off and show her femininity
in order to claim her modern identity as an unveiled woman.
If Kemals My Fatherland or Silistre, refashioned as Sunays My
Fatherland or My Headscarf, leads to the military coup in the novel, the
end of this coup is marked in a symmetrical move by yet another play, A
Tragedy in Kars, Sunays rewriting of Thomas Kyds English play about
murder and revenge, The Spanish Tragedy. Sunay chooses Kyds work as
the basis for his second play in the novel, telling us that Shakespeare in
fact stole the plot of The Spanish Tragedy for Hamlet.20 In both English
tragedies, there is a play-within-a-play that is used as a way to identify
the murderer, therefore effecting change in the plot of the frame play.
In both instances, the action in the play-within-a-play spills into the
frame play and takes over its reality. The two plays Sunay stages in
417
Snow similarly take over the reality of the novel. Mller identifies
the play-within-a-play form as a paradigmatic example of intratextual
interfigurality, which establishes a connection between the characters
of different contexts in the same work. It not only allows for the
intersection and interpenetration of different fictional contexts, but also
an examination of the relationship between fact and fiction.21 Pamuk,
indeed, uses this play-within-a-novel format to explore the relationship
between fact and fiction. Fiction here is not a reflection of truth or a
means of revealing an already existing truth. As Pamuk turns the mimetic
process on its head through Sunay, reality comes to be constructed
by fiction both in the first play, My Fatherland or My Headscarf, that
becomes the coup, and in the last play, The Tragedy in Kars, that resolves
the coup and prepares the ending of the novel.
Sunay Zaim adopts Kyds plotline in order to have another chance
to enact the modernization allegory of the unveiling of his first play,
My Fatherland or My Headscarf, which is interrupted by the coup. To
have Kadife, the girlfriend of the terrorist Blue and the leader of the
headscarf girls, take her headscarf off on the stage will seal the success
of Sunay Zaims secular coup. He pushes Kadife into participation by
offering to set Blue free in return. After an ironic negotiation between
Blue and Kadife mediated by Ka, who makes each of them believe that
they are really making the decision about what she should do, Kadife
decides to take her headscarf off without resorting to wearing a wig or
having another woman show her hair at the scene of unveiling.
However, just as she is about to go on stage, the constraint on her
is removed: the fake coup will soon be quashed now that government
vehicles are spotted on the re-opened roads. More importantly, Kadife
finds out that Blue has been murdered (together with her friend Hande)
in an ambush. In fact, Sunay gives Kadife the option to back out, but she
goes on the stage to play her role anyway. After she uncovers her hair,
Sunay gives her an unloaded gun to shoot at him he shows her and the
audience several times that the barrel of the gun is empty. Kadife knows
that Sunay will die that night because she has read about it on her way
to the theatre in the Border City Gazette, which habitually prints news of
events before they actually happen. She pulls the trigger and Sunay falls
down, dead.
Both Kadife and Sunay use the play as a mask for their real intentions
in order to achieve their own ends. Kadife avenges the murder of her
lover as well as her own humiliation. Sunay, the master of the plot, seizes
upon the opportunity provided him by the snowstorm, and plays out
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S I BEL EROL
before the very eyes of the audience his carefully planned suicide. He
is dying of heart disease, as we learn from the outset of the novel. In a
book that opens with an investigation into suicide girls, Sunay lays out
the anatomy of his suicide and ironically emerges as the only character in
the book who commits suicide for his ideals.
KA: MEDIATOR BETWEEN THE FOREGROUND AND THE BACKGROUND
Fiction in this novel is anti-mimetic; it creates reality rather than

reflecting it. The two plays within the novel are two important instances
of this kind of creation of reality. The way in which the local newspaper
anticipates real events also demonstrates this principle. One also sees
this dictum at work in the way the life of the main protagonist of Snow,
Ka, unfolds. For example, Ka has no intention of going to the National
Theatre on the night of the coup. When the newspaper publishes an
article announcing that he will read a new poem in public that night,
he laughs it off. He will have dinner with Ipeks

family. And, he hasnt
written a poem in four years. But the news comes to pass that night
exactly as the newspaper announces. With that precedent in mind, Ka
worries when the newspaper describes him as an atheist. Although the
owner of the paper promises to change this piece of news and to reprint
the paper, when he does not, Ka knows that his death warrant is signed
and that he will be killed by a fundamentalist, someone like the murderer
of the principal of the religious institute. This instance of telling, which
becomes foretelling, is another illustration of how Pamuk pushes the
boundary between fiction and reality in his intertextual construction of
parody.
This is not the only postmodernist twist in the depiction of Ka. He is,
in essence, a textual hero made up of a plethora of intertextual references
to Eastern and Western sources. Pamuk flaunts Kas meaning as an
overdetermined signifier. Yet, he is also the central hero of the modernist
narrative of loss, alienation, suffering and hopeless love. His Chekovian
(4) search and Turgenevian romanticism (31) constitute the affective
core of the book, staining everything he views with his melancholy. As
a hero of both postmodernist conventions and of modernist sensibilities,
Kas character embodies in microcosmic form the dual structure of the
book. He is also the mediator of the modernist foreground and the
postmodernist background in moving back and forth between these two
levels. Because of this structural duality and ambiguity, he inspires a
variety of responses and readings. Although he is a hero par excellence
419
of similarity because he is either like the people he meets or he wants to

be like them, he is tragically and, at the end, fatally misread as a mark of
difference.
The reason Ka goes to Kars in the first place is to find a place
of familiarity where he will feel at home, where he can remember his
younger self. When he returns to Turkey after having spent twelve years
in Germany, he chooses to go to Kars because Istanbul, his home town,
has changed to such an extent that it no longer feels like home. Kars
is an amalgamation of various historical times all at once, summed up
by its description in the archeological vocabulary of layers of excavation.
There, he can regress to a past in a way that will erase his present pain
and troubles. His mother has just died and he is seeking the comfort and
consolation of familiarity in the mental state of a return to the womb.
The narrator tells us that Kas sudden decision to travel to Kars was
motivated [. . . ] by a desire to return to his childhood (18). Kars, much
more like the Istanbul of his childhood, allows him to recall his memories
and relive his past experiences (including the last military coup). He
can also recoup his youth by courting Ipek,

a friend from his university
days. And while he finds consolation from Necip, who holds Kas head
between his hands as his mother would have typically done, he asks for
a similar gesture from Ipek,

revealing that he is feeling like a lost child
and is searching for the maternal even in the sexual. He hears a favourite
song from his past, Roberta, spilling out from a little store several times,
sending him back to his youth. He speaks with young people engaged
passionately in life-and-death discussions. Most importantly, after a
barren spell, he starts to write poetry again. In providing consolation
and renewal for him, Kars emerges as a psychological space or even
an allegorical realm where Kas past and youthful promise have been
preserved intact. His need for parental certainty and affirmation finds
a fulfillment in Kars, where, we might even say, this psychological need
motivates the military coup as part of a return to the past.
Although as a textual signifier of innumerable sources, Ka has a
literary richness and depth that no other character has; he is very much
like the other characters in Kars because he cannot experience his own
meaning, which is only available to the reader. Like the people of Kars,
Ka lacks self-knowledge. He has had a miserable life in Germany. He has
little money and no success to show for himself. He has no contact with
anybody there; he cannot speak German and considers himself different
from the Turks in Germany. Yet he aspires to marry Ipek

and take her
back to Frankfurt. By ironically cutting to Kas bare and disorderly room
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S I BEL EROL
in Germany after the love-making scene, Pamuk shows his readers that
Kas wish to marry Ipek

is delusional because he has no place to take her
and no income for them to live on. But Ka continues to hope for this
outcome until the very end. In fact, he even betrays Blue to achieve this
end.
Kas psychological similarity to other characters in Kars is repeated as
a physical similarity in his uncanny resemblance to the young Islamists
Necip and Fazl. These characters are rendered as a kind of allegorical,
alternative representation of his youth, strengthening the feeling that
Kars holds Kas past. He is an older version of Necip who identifies Ka as
somebody he himself will be in twenty years. Necip confidently tells Ka,
You are my future. And my instinct also tells me this: when you look at
me, you see your own youth, and thats why you like me (137). Taken
aback by this, Ka asks, So, you think youre the person I was twenty
years ago (138). They both quickly accept that they are the younger and
older manifestations of the same character.
Fazl adds another dimension to this Doppelgnger relationship. He is
Necips identical twin in not only looking exactly like him, but also in
thinking like him. In fact, Fazl, a quieter and more passive character,
comes into his own only after Necip dies and he takes on Necips dream
of writing a science fiction novel and marrying Kadife, which were also
his own secret, guilty desires. Necip clarifies the difference between his
connection with Fazl and his similarity to Ka: first referring to Fazl
and then to Ka, he says, We think the same thing at the same time. But
with you and me, there is a time difference (138). Pamuk links these
characters in a relationship of similarity. Necip and Fazl are readily
perceived as the same. Moreover, even though they appear to be different
from Ka, they are also the same person as him. This latter sameness is not
easily visible because it is expressed through a time difference of twenty
years and encapsulates this temporal interval in its representation.
Pamuk signals that Ka is part of a larger whole and refers to at least
one further character when Ka admits he is a Gemini (118), a twin.
However, since his double Necip already has a double in Fazl, these
three characters are linked in a relationship of series. This linkage is also
reinforced by the fact that their names Necip, Fazl and Ka, are parts
of a whole; together they add up to the name of the famous religious
poet Necip Fazl Ksakrek, who is referenced in Snow when his work
Byk Dogu (The Great East) is mentioned. We are told that Necip
and Fazl would repeatedly read The Great East, their masters greatest
book (106).
421
This usage of a constellation of names that add up to the name of an

author is copied from Kafka. For example, stringing together the names
of two characters in The Trial Franz and Joseph K. gives us Kafkas
name. K. is the protagonist both of The Trial and The Castle. The latter
work is alluded to when we hear of the castle in Kars at the very end of the
novel (418). As Ka is one way of pronouncing the letter K in Turkish,
there is clearly a deliberate linkage between Pamuks Ka and Kafkas K.
This is buttressed by the similarity between them. Ka is very much a
Kafkaesque character; he too is engaged in a surreal search.
Ka is, however, more than Kafkaesque; he is a Romantic too. His
openness to everybody is a mark of his Romantic nature. Orhan, the
narrator, romanticizes Ka as a poet who creates out of his genius
while describing his own novel-writing as pedantic and technical. Ka
is associated with Coleridge who, together with Wordsworth, wrote the
creed of English Romanticism in their preface to The Lyrical Ballads.
Kas method of composition is reminiscent of Coleridges experience
of writing Kubla Khan in that the poems come to him as a whole.
Just as Coleridge forgot a part of the poem when the man from
Porlock knocked on his door, Ka loses some lines of a poem due to
an unfortunate interruption. This method of Romantic composition is,
however, tempered by a reference to divine revelation, for poems come
to Ka in the same way that the Koran came to the Prophet Mohammed,
namely by vahiy, that is, divine inspiration.
These are positive associations for Kas sympathy and openness to
others. However, this fluidity of opinion and judgement has a downside
in Kas moral ambiguity. He is a liar. He never does what he promises.
He does not give Necips letters to Kadife, nor does he give Muhtars
poems to their editor friend as Muhtar requested, nor Kadifes lighter to
Blue as he was supposed to. He is also a plagiarizer. The poem he reads at
the theatre, Where God Does Not Exist, is actually Necips. He betrays
Blue to the secret police in exchange for an arrangement that would get
him and Ipek

out of Kars alive. He is like the character played by Marlon
Brando in the film mentioned in the novel, Queimada, in that his very
plan inevitably leads to his death.
The item that easily identifies Ka for his killer is his coat, which is
described in detail on the first page of the novel as something that sets Ka
apart. In Pamuks use of the coat as identity-marker there is an allusion to
Gogols Overcoat, a story in which the protagonists new coat also marks
him out for violence.22 Another work mentioned in Pamuks novel, the
tenth-century Persian epic Shahnameh, presents a variation on the role of
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such identifying markers. In Shahnameh, the hero Rostam kills Sohrab

when he fails to see the wristband that identifies the latter as his son.
Whereas the unavailability of the sign leads to death in the Shahnameh, it
is its availability that facilitates the murder in Pamuks novel.
But the coat in Snow is also important for identifying its seller, whose
name serves as yet another indicator of the novels deep dramatic irony.
The clerk at the department store who sold Kas coat is called Hans
Hansen. Later when he needs to invent a liberal journalist to whom
the manifesto is to be delivered, Ka uses the clerks name. It is ironic
that the elaborate discussions, planning, and negotiations surrounding
the manifesto and its delivery to a made-up character are undertaken
in order to get Ipeks

father Turgut Bey out of the hotel because Ipek
says that she cannot have sex with Ka in the hotel, when her father
is there.23 However, this lie that forms the basis of a central irony in
the novel connects to another intertext, Thomas Manns Tonio Krger.24
Hans Hansen is a character in Manns novella who represents the kind
of easy happiness the protagonist, a tortured and isolated artist, cannot
have. The uncomplicated happiness that Tonio imagines for his blueeyed, blond friend is not far removed from the happy life that Ka paints
for his Hans, who is naturally also blue-eyed and blond.
LOCI OF SNOW S POSTMODERNIST IRONY
The main source of irony in Snow is the dramatic kind that juxtaposes
two ways of seeing the world. While the characters in the novel
seem to insist on the substantive and irreconcilable difference between
the East and the West, the novel they inhabit shows precisely the
interchangeability of East and West, drawing equally from Eastern
and Western sources. To claim that there is a modernist core that is
surrounded and enveloped by a postmodernist narrative is to reformulate
the same juxtaposition with respect to form and style. Pamuks are
modernist characters earnestly and passionately searching for artistic
accomplishment, political activism, and personal happiness while trying
to make a stance, but the text they are enclosed in is postmodernist.
Like two concentric circles of different sizes, the monovalent and limited
world of the modernist characters is encapsulated in the larger circle of
its polyvalent postmodernist narrative.
From a technical point of view, Pamuk uses centrifugal and centripetal
operations to keep these two worlds separated. The centrifugal impulse
is fuelled by intertextuality, which creates ironic parodies by constantly
423
opening up the narrative to other texts and readings. Through parodic

multiplication, the postmodernist circle radiates and expands outward.
The centripetal impulse that fixes the monovalence of the characters,
and encloses them in their snow globe of a world, works through
literalization, which ends up also distancing and flattening them out.
The novel achieves this literalization, which strips the characters of their
psychological depth and therefore deprives the reader of the chance to
identify with them, by flaunting its own textuality. Pamuk engages the
reader in a metatextual peekaboo by revealing the technical aspects of his
creation as an inside joke, and as a result strengthens the dramatic irony
of the novel by fostering an identification with the birds eye writerly
point of view rather than with the viewpoint and lives of the characters.
The novel thus exposes the condition of its creation by foregrounding
its own textuality and the fabric of its narrative. Here, clothing becomes
a key sign around which the postmodernist irony of the novel is woven;
an item of dress functions as an identity marker as well as the cloth
out of which identity is cut. I have already discussed the importance of
his coat for our understanding of Ka. Ipek,

who dresses in the style of
the 1970s, complains to Ka that her conservative former husband did
not want her to wear her favourite dress. While packing her suitcase in
preparation to leave Kars with Ka, she selects a velvet dress and the silk
shawl that goes with it: the beautiful black velvet evening dress Muhtar
had bought for her in Istanbul, its back so low that he had only ever
allowed her to wear it at home; the embroidered silk satin shawl that
shed bought to conceal the almost equally low-cut front (349, emphasis
added). The peculiarity of the scene draws the readers attention to the
correspondence between the materials mentioned and the names of the
two main female protagonists: Kadife literally means velvet and Ipek
silk.
The colour blue is also literalized in an ice-blue angora sweater that
[Ipeks]
late uncle had brought to her from Germany (349).25 Because
this sweater is categorized together with the silk and velvet clothes Ipek
cannot wear in Kars, it gains the resonance of the more direct allusions to
people, in this case the terrorist Blue. The identification of the characters
with the fabrics after which they are named reveals the degree to which
these characters are figures cut out of the fabric of narrative.
In using clothing as metaphor, whether one speaks of colour, fabric or
cut, the novel focalizes on clothing, headscarves, and coats as key markers
of identity and, especially, modernity in Turkey. Here as elsewhere
in Pamuks work, the tailor serves as a metaphor for the enabler of
modernity and sewing as a metaphor for the writing of its history.
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S I BEL EROL
A tailors atelier is the headquarters of the coup. The conceit of the novel
overlaps with the idea of theatre as history discussed earlier, but this
is also a typically structuralist metaphor in that texts are spoken of as
entities made from interwoven tissues and textual creation as weaving or
lacemaking.26
The metatextual suggestion that the characters are static and flat cutouts of various fabrics is strengthened by details that underline the fact
that they do not change. Ipek

does not seem to have aged in the twenty
years she and Ka have not seen each other. She still wears the same
kind of clothes she wore at the university. When Orhan, following the
example of Ka, falls in love with her, she is still wearing the same large
buckled belt and skirt Ka noticed and described as anachronistic four
years earlier. There are reasons for Ipeks

immutability. She is a projected
ideal, a fantasy that can only be experienced as nostalgia. Barbie-like
(with her very long blond hair and very long neck), she is stuck in the
realm of dreams as a projection of nostalgic fantasy (or in the closed-up
world of a snow globe represented by Kars), waiting to be discovered
or rediscovered. It is no coincidence then that she looks like Melinda
the porn star, who is equally fixed in the fantasy world of pornographic
tapes because they not only look alike, but represent two sides of the same
fantasy.
Ka too is static and flat, though in a peculiar way. The pink or red
lights constantly haloing him as he moves in different spaces gives one
the sense that he has not moved at all. The red light is of special interest.
It can come from a street lamp, the headlights of a parked car as on the
night of his murder, or a neon sign that usually marks a place whose
name begins with the letter K, the initial of his name, as is the case
with the Karspalace Hotel, where he stayed, or the Kaufhof Department
Store, where he bought his coat. Ka is like a special icon or even a
target for shooting. In returning to this image frequently, Pamuk reminds
us that what animates Ka is the force of our reading and imagination.
Even as Pamuk creates his characters in the mimetic, realist tradition, he
constantly undermines the readers identification with them by deflating
their reality and exposing their constructedness.
This kind of ironic deflation is also at work in the effect created by
Kas poems. To the readers surprise, most of the poems located on the
metaphysical snowflake summing up Kas accomplishments and spiritual
journey refer to actual objects, places and people despite their highly
figurative language. All Humanity and the Stars and Stars and Their
Friends have a celestial ring to them, but when we find out that the

425
last name of Kadife, Ipek

and Turgut Bey is Yldz, that is, Star, we
are jolted into the realization that these poems really refer to the family
and their actual friends. The most important example of this kind of
literalization of figurative language relates to the poem The Place Where
God Does Not Exist. This is actually Necips poem that he recites to Ka
in the bathroom at the theatre before Ka usurps it and reads it as his own
on the stage. This poem, reminiscent of the miraculous burning bush
scene in a story about Moses in The Old Testament,27 describes a tree
struck by a lightning-like red flash in a hellish landscape. It represents
Necips nightmare. Necip believes that if the scene of the poem existed
in this world, it would prove that he is in reality an atheist.
The place in Necips nightmare is, of course, real. It is located right
in front of the Aydn Photography Shop (where Fazl works part-time
after Kas departure from Kars), the lights of which have not worked for
years. The red of the traffic lights near it, the only set in Kars, falls on
the tree across the street from it, therefore casting a red halo around it
without burning it, not unlike Moses miraculous burning bush. The
reader knows this from the outset of the novel, for Ka makes a visual
note of the scene as he goes to the theatre during his first night in Kars
and he passes by it several times later. As the story unfolds, it becomes
apparent that Necip has always known of the existence of this place in
this world; this is revealed in a conversation between Fazl and Orhan at
the very end of the novel. Necip saw it every night from his bed in his
dorm room through a hole in the wall and, more importantly, he knew
all along that the scene of his nightmare, and the poem, were inspired by
what he saw.28 If one follows Necips own logic, one comes to an ironic
conclusion: he was an atheist after all.
Likewise, the poem plays an ironic role in Kas case, too. Ka rewrites
this poem, The Place Where God Does Not Exist, which appears first in
the novel, as his last poem, The Place Where the World Ends, which is
lost after his death. It is, however, not really lost since it is identical to the
first one that remains available on tape. Just before his death, Ka changes
the location of this poem on the spiritual snowflake map of his life where
each of the nineteen poems he has written in Kars are located on one of
the three axes of imagination, logic, and memory.29 Poems are placed on
the memory axis only if they are the result of lived experience. Working
on the internal symmetry of the map for four years in order to clarify its
deep and mysterious underlying structure (263), Ka finally moves The
Place Where the World Ends onto the memory axis, which becomes a
coded confession that he has been to Necips dorm room from where the
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S I BEL EROL
scene of the poem can be seen, and consequently that he is the one who
betrayed Blue to the secret police. Necips dorm room, as it turns out,
was the headquarters of the secret police responsible for the assassination
of Blue.
The reader is required to pay considerable attention to these and
other details of the narrative in order to perform the kind of deduction
required to solve internal riddles such as this. This attentiveness not only
puts the reader in opposition to the broad-brush and overgeneralized
interpretations the characters give of themselves and their world, but
makes him/her feel this opposition as an aspect of his/her reading
experience, which leads to the slighting and dismissal of the characters
views. While the characters may insist on their difference in the novel,
the reader well knows that in principle they are the same. Here are
some telling details. Regardless of their political orientation, everybody
watches the soap opera Marianna at four oclock every afternoon. And, in
spite of what they say they think of the West, they all drink Coke. Coke
alludes to the unitary way in which families enjoy a simple pleasure, as
well as to television programmes (e.g. soap operas) and films made in
Hollywood, which of course are replete with Coke advertisements.
Despite their claim to uniqueness, many characters are more similar
than they are prepared to accept. For example, Blue and Sunay Zaim,
configured as opposites of each other, both limp. Other characters are
so alike that they could serve as each others doubles. As I have shown,
Necip, Fazl and Ka are connected in a triadic relationship that shows that
they are different representations of the same person with a twenty-year
time lag. This relationship between the men mirrors a similar relationship
between Ipek,
Melinda and Kadife. Ipek
and Melinda both look like each
other and are connected through their function as fantasy figures. Their
relationship duplicates the connection between Necip and Fazl in terms
of their physical similarity, but also reverses it in that the twin figures in
this constellation are the older people.
Kadife is the equivalent of Necip and Fazl in that they are of the
same age. In her relationship with Melinda and Ipek,

she represents
their alternative future. The same type of temporal twist that exists in
the depiction of Necip and Ka across time also appears in the depiction
of Kadife and Ipek,

although it is a time difference that first has to be
discovered because the reader is not given any indication that Kadife
is also much younger than Ipek.

Kadife remembers the frustration of
being measured against her perfect older sister by the teachers they
shared at middle school and tells an anecdote about a biology teacher

427
who asked if Ipek

was late to class on the very day when Kadife was
woefully late herself (228). Yet, Kadife and Ipek

could not have been in
middle school at the same time because Kadife is twenty-one while Ipek
30
is forty-two. This time warp can only be explained by the fact that they
are representations of the same persona in the way that Necip and Ka
are. They are connected directly by the attraction that Ka feels to both,
as well as indirectly by the fact that Kadife is the female ideal for Necip
and Fazl, who are Kas younger manifestations. The happiness of Fazl
in marrying Kadife and writing his novel serves as a collective resolution
for all of these six characters.31
DIFFRANCE: DIFFERENCE AS SAMENESS
This connection of characters through a time lapse, or the juxtaposition

of two characters to depict different times in the life of the same
character, illuminates Pamuks way of negotiating difference and
similarity. Difference and similarity exist as two separate levels of
meaning in the novel as well as two ways of reading it. The idea of
difference governs the meaning-making process of the characters in what
I have called the foreground or the modernist core of the novel, while the
principle of similarity dominates the narrative of the background, which
is the basis of the relationship between the author and the reader and the
site of the postmodernist parody. Pamuk places the concepts of similarity
and difference in a temporal relationship by separating them through
time in a manner similar to the way in which he depicts his characters.
Derridas concept of diffrance comes in handy here because it
conceives of difference as a deferral in time and space of the Same.
Anything that is different from a prior and later element in a chain of
significations is sameness that is deferred in time and space. All terms
in a series are the manifestations of the same thing except in different
coordinates of time and space. Ultimately, anything that is seen as an
ontological difference, that is, any conceptualization of difference in
substance, is encapsulated in a larger system of signification characterized
by a chain of moving differences.
What allows the representation of the same at a different point in time
is the trace (mark of belonging to a different time and place) that separates
it from its previous representation, which we simply and mistakenly see
as different. However, this is only a condition of its representation. We
may read these instances as difference because we may see them as A,
B, C, but they are other names for the representation of A at different
428
S I BEL EROL
times and in different places, and reading them as A1, A2, A3 reveals
their essential sameness. Derrida explains this in the following way:
It is because of diffrance that the movement of signification is possible only if
each so-called present element, each element appearing on the scene of presence,
is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of
the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to
the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than
to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of the
very relation to what it is not [. . . ] This interval is what might be called spacing, the
becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization).32
Snow presents this movement of the Same as Different at different

locations of time through several relationships of encapsulation in which
the largest terms both include and hold in place the smaller terms out
of which they are generated. The most striking of these is provided by
the clear plastic images in The Encyclopedia of Life that Orhan looks at in
Kas house in Istanbul. That insert shows the different stages of a babys
growth in a mothers womb. Each diagram is a different snapshot of the
same baby that looks different because it belongs to a different period of
growth.
The sequence of images depicting the babys growth is a
representation of what Derrida means by diffrance because, despite
their differences, all of the pictures in the series represent the same
baby. This is further emphasized by the fact that the picture of the last
stage of growth and therefore of the largest baby encloses pictures of
all the previous stages. Furthermore, what the image represents is not
the development of only one particular baby, but of all human babies,
which strongly drives home the idea of the sameness of all humanity
that motivates and guides the usage of intertextuality in Snow. The
clear plastic insert becomes a visual symbol of the books main thesis
about the relationship between similarity and difference, and the ultimate
enclosure of difference by similarity.
Another representation of Derridas diffrance in the book is the
linguistic encapsulation in Kars, the name of the city, of the names of the
hero Ka and the title of the novel Kar, which also refers in Turkish to
the snow that falls throughout the novel.33 The way in which the city of
Kars contains both Kar (snow) and Ka as constitutive linguistic elements
of its name and meaning demonstrates the emergence of similarity out
of what appears to be different. Significantly, Kars is already in a
temporal relationship with Istanbul as its past and as a repository of Kas
childhood.
429
Yet, in another example, Pamuk demonstrates the same idea of

encapsulation in reverse by moving from the largest to the smallest term
of the series. Offering his poetic signature by way of a childhood game,
Ka resorts to the image of concentric circles by starting with the largest
term, universe, then goes back to the smaller term, world, to end up in
Turkey, Istanbul and finally in the neighborhood of Nisantas (291). All
the terms that follow are already included in the largest term universe.
Through these chains of encapsulations that illustrate Derridas
definition of diffrance, the novel shows that any instance of difference
that the characters dwell on is a manifestation of sameness that only
appears different as a condition of its representation. If the characters
keep insisting on difference, it is because their view is myopic, and
because what they see is only a single term in a series of relationships.
We as readers, on the other hand, see the continuity of what they
perceive as difference in a series that reframes it as similarity because a
serial relationship establishes the temporal connection between the terms.
What appears as different and oppositional in the isolated relation of two
terms becomes a relationship of continuity when a longer view is taken
and these two terms are placed in the context of three or more terms. It is
important that the novel depicts its contrasts through triples and triadic
relationships that connect a present with a past and a future, as is the
case in the relationships between Necip, Fazl, and Ka on the one hand,
and between Ipek,

Melinda, and Kadife on the other.34 Even the book
we are reading has three versions in three different genres. It is originally
written by Ka as a book of poetry which is lost. Using the material from
Kas diaries, Orhan rewrites it as a novel, which opens with a hypothetical
sentence acknowledging the ghost of the poetry haunting it: If this were
the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside
him the silence of the snow (3). It is also being written as a science fiction
fantasy by Fazl, who is following a synopsis written by Necip. We may
say that the technique of time warp seeps in from this form. Ultimately,
the appearance of the same story in various genres shows that there is no
definitive, authoritative version and that it can be rewritten infinitely, as
the concept of a series indicates.
The principle of a series allows the notation of diffrance, and
therefore also demonstrates the return of the same under the guise of
difference. Derrida writes, On the basis of this unfolding of the same
as diffrance, we see announced the sameness of diffrance and repetition
in the eternal return.35 The novel ultimately reveals this eternal return
of the same through intertextuality by treating its various Eastern
430
S I BEL EROL
and Western texts as instances of diffrance whose matrix is Literature

with a capital L. However, the most poignant and economic symbol of
diffrance in the novel is snow because, through its dual reference as both
difference and similarity, it also encapsulates difference and similarity in
a relationship of continuity. As the encyclopedia article clearly identifies,
each snowflake is different: Each crystal snowflake forms its unique
hexagon (219). However, snow, as we see it throughout the snow-storm
in the novel, is not; rather, it returns again and again as the Same.
NOTES
1 http://nobelprize.org//. The Nobel Committees wording seems to have forever
fixed the terms of discussing Pamuk. Here is the opening sentence of a review of
his most recent publication, Other Colors: Essays and A Story: Orhan Pamuk takes
the pundits dry talk of a clash of civilizations and gives it a human face, turns it on
its head and sends it spinning wildly. Pico Iyer, The New York Times Book Review,
30 September 2007, pp. 1617.
2 I am using the term series in the mathematical sense or in the sense of abstract logic
to describe a set of numbers, terms or concepts, where each term has a deducible
relationship of similarity with the ones that precede and succeed it. A mathematical
series could be {1, 3, 5, 7} or we can have a non-mathematical series such as {red,
apple, yellow, banana}. The relationship is determined by one variable in these series.
One can have other series in which the relationship between the terms is determined
by more than one variable.
3 I use the word encapsulation to describe a relationship of inclusion that is best
embodied by the image of Russian dolls. Smaller terms and items are included in
the larger one without losing their form and identity. The largest term functions like
a container of its own constituents. When you open the container, you can still see
the other items or terms as separate entities. Pamuk uses this kind of relationship
between the concepts of similarity and difference and flaunts it as a trope. I will give
examples of this trope in the last section of the essay.
4 See for example Fethi Nacis response in Romanda Byk Bir Yetenek, in Orhan
Pamuku Anlamak (Understanding Orhan Pamuk), edited by Engin Kl (Istanbul:

Iletisim, 1999), pp. 1822.
5 One has to deduce the name by following a series of clues. We are told that Hoja has
the same name as his grandfather (p. 24), and at the end that the grandfathers name
is Abdullah (p. 80). The White Castle (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
6 Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), p. 17.
7 G. A. Phillips, Sign, Text, Difference, in Intertextuality, edited by Heinrich F. Plett
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), pp. 78101.
8 It was Hegel who first noticed that history and theatre are made of the same
materials, said Sunay. Remember that, just as in the theatre, history chooses those
who play the leading roles. And just as actors put their courage to the test on the
stage, so, too, do the chosen few on the stage of history. Snow (London: Faber and
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
431
Faber, 2004), p. 202. All subsequent page numbers referenced in my essay refer to
this edition. Sunay returns to describing the historical role of the actor on p. 206.
Pamuk has used this kind of dramatic irony before by alluding to anachronistic
information that his historical characters did not have, but his readers surely did in
The White Castle and in My Name Is Red. But these are not extended commentaries,
and remain isolated. In Snow, by contrast, this layer of irony has become a developed
system of reference like a system of subtitles.
Snow, p. 125.
See in particular A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1988) and
The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989).
A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 126.
This linking of parody and pastiche (and other terms) may be a response to Fredric
Jameson who makes a careful distinction between these terms in Postmodernism
and Consumer Society (in Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster (London:
Pluto Press, 1985), pp. 111126). Jameson argues that parody is an older form
that relies on a recognizable normative framework, one lost with the onset of
postmodernity. With individualism and distinct styles having disappeared in this
vacuum of values, what is possible now is only pastiche as a form of empty parody.
According to Jameson, whereas parody creates humour, pastiche as blank mimicry
can only engender a nostalgia for the certainty and individuality that are lost
(p. 114). Moreover, Jameson suggests that the promiscuous copying and pasting
that postmodernist intertextuality involves leads to a further erosion of contexts by
uprooting and ahistoricizing texts (p. 112).
Hutcheon, Politics of Postmodernist Parody, in Plett (ed.), Intertextuality,
pp. 225236.
Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 225.
Ibid., p. 224225.
The snow globe/dome is a favourite image of Pamuks, which appears in almost all
of his books. In Snow it first appears on p. 66 where Ka imagines himself inside one.
Wolfgang G. Mller, Interfigurality. A Study on the Interdependence of Literary
Figures, in Plett (ed.), Intertextuality, pp. 101121.
Kenan Akyz, Introduction, in Namk Kemal, Vatan yahut Silistre (Ankara: Elif
Matbaas, 1990), p. 8.
With the allusion to Shakespeares borrowing, Pamuk identifies the generic plot and
form with a better-known example than Kyds play. However, he also brings up the
concept of plagiarism, which is the end limit, the test case of intertextuality and
the name of what Ka does when he recites Necips words as his own poem at the
theatre.
Mller, Interfigurality, pp. 118119. It is interesting that Mller singles out
Kyds The Spanish Tragedy as the most salient example of this kind of interfigural
intertextuality.
Later in the novel there is another homage to Gogols Dead Souls when Kars is
described as a place full of ghosts and dead souls.
Later she changes her mind. Like everything else that originally poses a constraint in
Pamuks works, this constraint is also shown to change and lose its force. Any event
that a character is forced into is always shown to be a choice the second time around,
which restores the sense of responsibility to the character.
432
S I BEL EROL
24 I am indebted to Michael Beard for pointing out that Hans Hansen is a character in
Tonio Krger.
25 Also in: Ipek

opened a drawer and took out the ice-blue sweater shed never been
able to wear in Kars (p. 372).
26 Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 160.
27 This is clearly a reference to Chapter 3 of the The Book of Exodus. However, the
image of a tree at the end of the world is already introduced in My Name Is Red (see
p. 250 and p. 385). In Snow, Kars is literally the end of the world. Upon arriving in
Kars, Ka thinks, It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten;
as if it were snowing at the end of the world (p. 10, emphasis added).
28 The tension about the location of the image is rendered much more dramatic,
unambiguous, and facile by its translation as that world (p. 426). In Turkish it is
more ironically bu dnya (this world) which exposes the self-delusion, falsity and
compartmentalization at the core of the internal crisis of faith conjured up by the
sim, 2002), p. 419.

image. For the Turkish original, see Kar (Istanbul:
Ileti
29 The narrator Orhan explains that Bacons Tree of Knowledge was the inspiration for
Kas usage of a snowflake as a spiritual map (p. 383). However, another model for
this kind of usage of a geometrical shape to represent a spiritual biography could be
the writings of medieval Muslim mystics.
30 Ipek
is the same age as Ka; they were classmates at university. Kadife is identified as
twenty-one by Necip who is seventeen and says, Kadife is four years older than me
(p. 136).
31 These six characters form the hexagon of the snowflake or the novel as it is identified
by its title.
32 Jacques Derrida, Diffrance at the Origin, in A Derrida Reader, edited by Peggy
Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 6179.
33 Margaret Atwood has observed this in her review of the novel for The New York
Times Book Review: Kar is snow in Turkish, so we have already been given an
envelope, inside an envelope inside an envelope, 15 August 2004, p. 9.
34 As if to copy number twenty from the twenty-year difference between the younger
and older characters as a proportional yardstick of duration between intervals, events
in the novel are reported with twenty-minute intervals. In twenty minutes or after
twenty minutes are the most frequently used markers of time.
35 Derrida, Diffrance at the Origin, p. 70. I believe Murat Glsoy is responding
to the same return when he described Pamuks works as Escher-like in a talk
entitled Yaratc Yazar: O, teki Kisi (The Creative Writer: The Other), given at a
conference on Pamuk at Bogazii University in Istanbul on 14 May 2007.

Snow As Parody

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Comparative Critical Studies 4, 3, pp.

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody:

THE EVOLUTION OF THE EASTWEST TROPE IN PAMUKS NOVELS

has named hzn in his memoir Istanbul

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

loved by traditional critics. With their specifically Turkish thematic

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

childhood garden in Gebze without needing to go back to Venice. One

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

mesmerized by it. Reminiscent of Borges, one of the Mehmets, who was

In turning to Snow, Pamuks most intertextual novel to date, one will

of the East-West question within the Turkish context by touching upon

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

suggests that Westerners do not like being regarded as a homogeneous

Contemporary theoretical discussion of parody is dominated by Linda

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

echoing and recontextualization of a past work in a new historical,

guaranteed. Their dilemma is similar to that of Ipeks

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

Another important intertext for the coup is the play Buzlar

takes place is entitled My Fatherland or My Headscarf as an homage

protagonists Zekiye and Islam

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

Fiction in this novel is anti-mimetic; it creates reality rather than

he laughs it off. He will have dinner with Ipeks

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

of similarity because he is either like the people he meets or he wants to

can also recoup his youth by courting Ipek,

a similar gesture from Ipek,

from the Turks in Germany. Yet he aspires to marry Ipek

Kas wish to marry Ipek

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

This usage of a constellation of names that add up to the name of an

him and Ipek

such identifying markers. In Shahnameh, the hero Rostam kills Sohrab

in order to get Ipeks

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

opening up the narrative to other texts and readings. Through parodic

his coat for our understanding of Ka. Ipek,

that they do not change. Ipek

years earlier. There are reasons for Ipeks

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

last name of Kadife, Ipek

same age. In her relationship with Melinda and Ipek,

of Kadife and Ipek,

is also much younger than Ipek.

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

who asked if Ipek

woefully late herself (228). Yet, Kadife and Ipek

This connection of characters through a time lapse, or the juxtaposition

Snow presents this movement of the Same as Different at different

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

Yet, in another example, Pamuk demonstrates the same idea of

and between Ipek,

and Western texts as instances of diffrance whose matrix is Literature

Pamuku Anlamak (Understanding Orhan Pamuk), edited by Engin Kl (Istanbul:

Reading Orhan Pamuks Snow as Parody

25 Also in: Ipek

sim, 2002), p. 419.

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